Marvel Comics is once again showing its support for diverse characters in its comics. The comic book giant’s first openly gay character, Northstar in Astonishing X-Men, is going to propose to his longtime partner in the next issue. It will also be the first gay marriage scene in a Marvel series. Northstar, who is a ...
After you get engaged, it’s easy to become bogged down with planning the wedding, if you choose to have one. But while being bombarded with emails about chair covers (seriously, never give your email address to anyone in this industry), occasionally it dawns on one that hey, one is going to be married after all ...
The market for weddings in Britain is now valued at 7.5 billion pounds a year. The amount Brits spend on weddings has more than doubled since the ’80s. Now, some experts are claiming that this wedding day extravagance only leads to a more likely divorce. High Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge said last week that ...
Marrying an old rich guy and divorcing him may no longer be the only way to make a profit off nuptials. A US insurance company will pay you to work out your problems and stay married. SafeGuard Guarantee Corp. will offer marriage insurance that protects couples who get divorced, but will also give couples an ...
Bloody Facebook. I knew there was a reason I became a reluctant convert. It’s all very well having hilarious banter with my actual friends, who are an international crowd, but there’s the well-documented difficulty of “people from the past.” I don’t mean a dark, shady past like everyone on Days of our Lives reveals just ...
Once again, I have lost faith in humanity. Admittedly, I lose faith in humanity fairly easily and often (just last week, a clip from Jackass: The Movie nearly reduced me to tears over the futility of existence). But nothing – nothing! – has compromised my faith in humankind as much as researching this article about ...
Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit begins in post-apartheid South Africa, when Silas spots the police lieutenant who raped Lydia nearly twenty years before. The novel follows the lives of the former activists, now married and seemingly settled into middle class life with a teenage son and a close circle of friends. The central themes are ...
When my grandmother got married in the 1950s, it wasn’t only for love. Marriage had a more practical purpose in those days: to secure a woman’s social status. The newest generation of brides may finally break the age-old rags-to-riches fairytale stereotype that insists a woman marry an older and wealthier gentleman. In fact, they may ...
I re-read Carol Shields when I want to find new layers to a familiar story. The Republic of Love lacks the gravitas of Shields’ more acclaimed novels, but it reinvents a basic love story with subtlety and wit. Familiarity underpins the lives of the interlinked characters, including the city, Winnipeg, which functions as both a ...
Anne Fine’s Fly in the Ointment takes me quickly through the life of Lois, whose son is dead after a lengthy stint of heroin use and whose husband has left her without saying goodbye. Indifferent to the dull, unpleasant husband and grieving for her son, Lois interrupts her second life of solitude and simple pleasures ...
The latest film in the American Pie series, American Reunion, contains a shocking scene – male full-frontal nudity including...
Dear Madame X, I have just started seeing this girl. She seems great, but she recently told me she...
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved arrived in my hands via a public library, when I was a broke teenager with...
My attention was drawn this week to an article about the reaction at a Canadian university to proposals to...
Airport security. Bloody nuisance. Also a conspiracy designed to subjugate women. Allow me to elaborate. Despite flying quite a...
The Cannes film festival has kicked off this week with controversy over the lack of films made by women...
Dear Madame X, I seem to be only attracted to men who are macho assholes. I like them at...
When A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, the term sexualized violence wasn’t in use. The distinction between sexualized...
